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CU-Boulder researchers advance understanding of delayed gratification

Linking willingness to wait to issues of trust

By Carah Wertheimer

For the Camera

Posted:
02/19/2016 06:54:37 PM MST

Updated:
02/19/2016 06:55:21 PM MST

Most people leave Target with red and white bags of household items, not scientific insights with the potential to impact research, public policy, and lives. But for University of Colorado professor Yuko Munakata, one particular trip to Target, about five years ago, was anything but typical.

Passing through the toy section, Munakata's boys Max, 4, and Kai, 2, began pointing at things that they wanted. They spotted Legos on the shelf and begged her to buy some.

Munakata was rushed. "Not now," she said, "we'll come back again later and get something bigger." She wanted to buy some socks and wrap it up. "We'll do errands now," she reassured them, "and it will all work out fine."

Max and Kai were just not having it. They wanted Legos there and then. Soon, they were on the verge of an all-out tantrum in the middle of the store.

Munakata, director of CU's Cognitive Development Center, wondered why her rational arguments were failing. She took a closer look and realized that the rowdy behavior was actually adaptive. In truth, she was not going to come back to Target and buy them bigger toys, and they knew it. Their insistence on instant gratification made complete sense under the circumstances.

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Back at her office, Munakata began questioning conventional academic wisdom about delay of gratification. Typically, she said, if a preschooler "fails to wait," or if a prison inmate is impulsive, we have assumed that cognitive deficits are to blame. Munakata wondered if they truly have executive functioning issues, "Or do they have cognitive control, and don't have trust?" Are they asking, 'Is it worth delaying gratification?'"

Munakata concluded that her sons' behavior was not about inadequate self-regulation, but a rational response to an unreliable environment.

"There are so many things in life when you have to trust people," Munakata said. "If the children's environment isn't trustworthy — how does that affect them?"

Striking results

While this is a radically different perspective on why kids cannot wait, it is not entirely new. Munakata points out that Walter Mischel, a towering figure in psychology, hinted at this direction back in the 1970s. For some reason, she said, the social-environment approach did not gain traction.

Mischel is known for his iconic marshmallow study, testing how long preschoolers can resist eating one marshmallow in order to receive two later.

"This marshmallow test has been linked so strongly to so many different important metrics of life success," Laura Michaelson, graduate student and lead co-author, said. "The links between early childhood delay of gratification, adolescent academic and social success, as well as successful adult functioning in personal and professional life, is well-established and marked."

Munakata and Michaelson, following 2013 studies correlating social trust with increased delay of gratification in adults, adapted the marshmallow study to assess the same in children. They randomly divided 34 preschoolers into two age and gender-balanced groups. One group witnessed their experimenter obviously lying to another adult. The other experimenter was honest.

The results were striking: children in the trustworthy environment waited three-times longer for a second marshmallow than children in the untrustworthy environment. The study appears in the journal Developmental Science.

How to structure interventions?

Munakata said, "This really changes how you think about interventions. Self-control, self-control, self-control — it's totally different to intervene to improve their sense of trust."

Michaelson studies the relationship between trust and delay of gratification among criminal offenders at Boulder County Jail.

"There is a lot of suggestive evidence that you can effect trust, both situation-specific trust and potentially more long-term, stable individual differences in trust. Lots of different things can do this," such as face-to-face contact and in-group status pairing, i.e. matching based on shared race, gender, age, geography, or other aspects of identity.

"How can we structure interventions?" Munakata asks. "It's about really thinking about behaviors in a broader context — that what might not look very sensible might be totally adaptive."

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